FeatureWill Europe be the first region to enact regulation for green software? There is currently no regulation in the world specific to the environmental impact of software and consumers and investors have yet to begin to reward or punish companies based on green technologyByKarl Flinders,Chief reporter and senior editor EMEAPublished: 07 Jan 2025 So far, there is no regulation anywhere in the world specific to the environmental impact of software a fact that runs alongside the reality that neither consumers nor investors are towards or away from companies based on the green credentials of their software.Many experts expect Europe to be thefirstregionto enactregulationthatenforcesgreen software practices. One of them isSantiago Fontanarrosa, vice-president of technology atGlobant, a digital services company and author of the bookGreen software engineering: exploring green technology for sustainable IT solutions.According toFontanarrosa,Europe is well-positioned to lead in green software regulationthanks in partto its strong sustainability initiatives and advancements in software engineering.Europeiscommitment to sustainability,as demonstrated byambitious initiatives like theEuropean Green Deal.Moreover,France leads in green software research,andGermanys Blue Angels offers the first global eco-friendly software certification.According toFontanarrosa, green software is not only about applying certain development practices, its also abouthow todeployand usethe resulting applications. As for what developers can do, many of the green software techniques can be taken from the practices used bypeople whowroteprograms in the 1970s, when CPUs were much less powerful, andmemory and storagewere much more limited. As processors became faster andmemory andstorage grew, software engineers have become more complacent.Today, my iPhone has more computingpower than the machine I used when I started working inthe 1990s,saysFontanarrosa.I have seen a big change since I began my career. Developers have become less concerned about how they use resources, like CPU and memory. And they no longer apply optimisation techniques. For example, when you have an algorithm that does a loop to go through a very long list, they dont look for ways of making that part of their code more efficient.When it comes to green software, efficiency pertains to how much energy a program consumes to perform its functions. This involves optimising not only the use of CPU time, memory access and I/O, but also the transfer of data over networks. If coders simply thought more about the physical operations going on underneath their code, they would develop greener software.For example, as compared to a program that periodically checks for updates, an event-based architecture that reacts only when new data becomes available is more efficient because it reduces the number of network requests. Biggerdesign decisions are also important an architect can take into account the fact that energy is cleaner at certain times of the day, and decide to have certain intensive tasks performed during those optimal periods.As for deploying software, one of the underlying principles is to minimise the amount of data traveling around networks, while another is to be selective of datacentres.The cloud nowadays is a commodity everyone uses,saysFontanarrosa.But the cloud is actually a big datacentre somewhere that consumes a lot of energy. If I can choose a data provider cloud that uses more green energy, that will have a big impact on my carbon footprint.Fontanarrosaalso advises developers and operators to reduce the number of instances theyre using on the cloud.Nowadays, you have a credit card, you do two clicks, and you have a whole new infrastructure up there,he says.You dont even worry about it. Thats the kind of mentality that we need to start changing.One example that illustrates how much of an impact software can have is given byDutch software guruDanny van Kootenin a2020 blog postthat influenced many other developers to makesimilarchanges.Van Kooten estimates that he reduced emissions by 59,000 kgofCOper month by making a very small change to his WordPress plugins that run on more than two million websites. That savings is the amount of COused to fly from Amsterdam to New York five times. He says that assuming the average website receives about 10,000 visitors a month and uses cache to serve returning users, a monthly savings of 10,000 kWh can be achieved for every 1 kilobyte a programmer shaves off of their JavaScript.Another exampleisdescribed inFontanarrosasbook, where hecompares two implementations of the Fibonacci sequence, using theCodeCarbontool to measure energy consumption. The first implementation used a recursive implementation and the second used an iterative approach with a for-loop. The iterative implementation used 99.34% less energy andreducedCOemissionsby 99.35%.This striking difference demonstrates how thoughtful implementation choices in algorithm design can drastically reduce energy consumption and emissions, showcasing the potential for greener and more efficient software development,saysFontanarrosa.Fontanarrosasays that even if governments are not pushing for green software, businesses and consumers can make it a reality. One encouraging sign is that a lot of companies have joined the Green Software Foundation sinceitsinception in May 2021, includingFontanarrosasorganisation,Globant.The mission of theGreen Software Foundation which was founded by Accenture, GitHub, Microsoft andThoughtWorks is tobuild a trusted ecosystem of people, standards, tooling and best practices for green software.According to Green Software Foundation, the ICT sector will account for 14% of the worlds carbon footprint by 2040, most of which will be from smartphones and datacentres.The website says that software developers contribute to global emissions in many ways. One is by producing new versions of their products, which often requires better hardware to run, rendering the existing computers obsolete.One encouraging sign of progress is that the Green Software FoundationsSoftware Carbon Intensity (SCI)specification recently achieved ISO standard status. However, this is nothing like government-backed regulation as SCI is still a voluntary, industry-driven standard.I encourage everyone to learn about green software,saysFontanarrosa.Go to the Green Software Foundation webpage,or any other related resource, to start thinking about it and trying to introduce minor changes in your digital products. Minor changes sum up to a big impact.Read more about IT sustainabilityAs the global transition towards developing low-carbon economies continues apace, Gartner shares its take on the actions enterprises must take now to navigate an increasingly volatile energy landscape.The hype around AI is increasingly being matched with discussionsabout how the technologys adoption will affect the environment, so what can IT leaders do to ensure they keep the companies they work for on the forefront of innovation, without compromising the environment - or their firms own corporate sustainability agenda?The past 12 months have seencompaniesrow back on their sustainability commitments, in response to economic pressures, but could doing so harm their bottom line in the long run?In The Current Issue:What do the home secretarys policing reforms mean for the future of the Police Digital Service?What are the security risks of bring your own AI?Download Current Issue